What can I say about my hometown in Northern Michigan? A small village right on the harbor, with plenty of hipster-y restaurants and quaint knick-knack shops, it’s the perfect spot for upper middle class families to vacation during the summer. Go a few miles out, and there is an endless supply of hiking trails and hunting spots for the more adventurous type. Tourists come every year to enjoy the beaches and take part in the small-town culture.
So what do I say when others ask me about where I grew up? Do I talk about how idyllic it was? To be able to go hiking in the wilderness whenever I wanted to have a view of the crystal clear waters every day of the year? How every fall, tourists came from all around to see the leaves that I drove by every day on my way to school, and how every summer, families would spend copious amounts of money to stay in the houses next door to my grandpa? About how I took the breathtaking nature for granted until I moved away and came to Ann Arbor?
Or will I talk about how after hearing my sister and me talk about what happened to our childhood friends, our friend had said, “What’s wrong with this place? Why is it that everyone died or went to prison?”
This type of contradiction was the undercurrent of my childhood, and has defined how I look back at those innocent years. When I was young, I honestly thought that I lived in the best place in the world. Sure, the world had problems, but those problems would never reach us all the way up north. I felt safe knowing that I was from a town too idyllic, too remote to ever be the center of anything scandalous. But as the years passed, and the cracks on the surface of my town’s reputation became more and more obvious, I began to lose the innocence and naïveté I had regarding the safety and wholesomeness of my hometown.
I know I’m incredibly privileged to have not had this veneer of stability shattered for so long. I had two parents that cared for me and my sister and took our lives and our education seriously, and for that I’m very grateful. But as I began to realize around my teenage years, this wasn’t the case for all my classmates. For some, the problems systemic to Northern Michigan had already become obvious to them at an early age.
Recently, news stories have emerged in local papers discussing a heroin problem and an overall drug problem in Northern Michigan. Grand Traverse County, the same county where the National Cherry Festival — an event to celebrate community and tourism — is held, is also ranked 25 on the list of counties in Michigan with the most drug overdose deaths. A recent nationwide study also showed 11 Northern Michigan counties were “among the top 5 percent at risk for the rapid spread of HIV.”
For many, myself included, it comes as a shock that the very place lauded for being family friendly and welcoming could hide something so dark just below the surface. But it’s also not fair, upon learning this information, to judge Northern Michigan as a type of rural, redneck, backwater place.
My hometown is not the idealized rural community that a lot of Michiganders believe it to be, but it’s also not the white trash place a lot of other people think it is. Like any place, Northern Michigan has a complicated history that has led up to a complicated present. Like any place, Northern Michigan has a lot of problems as well as a lot of amazing qualities.
So what will I say about my hometown? I’m not entirely sure yet. I know what others will say when I tell them where I’m from: probably a couple “My family owns a house up there,”s a few “You’re from such a beautiful place,”s and maybe even a “What was it like growing up so far away from everything?” It’s true that these responses really only reflect one side of Northern Michigan, but I can’t blame the people who see my hometown in its more idyllic form. I myself had a tilted view of my home until recently.
I think the only lesson that can be learned from these experiences is that nothing is as perfect as it seems. No matter how beautiful and idyllic a place can be, there will always be something darker lying right below the surface. And this may be a depressing thought, but it’s also a wonderfully humanizing thought. Learning to see everything in a multidimensional light — that person you hate, your beliefs, that place you used to vacation at — is the mark of someone who is truly maturing. And though it’s painful to have to confront the ugly in something near and dear to your heart, the ability to see the world in a more nuanced way is valuable beyond compare.
Elena Hubbell can be reached at elepearl@umich.edu.